DOSTOIEVSKY AND TOLSTOY
AND THE YOUNGER CHOIR OF RUSSIAN WRITERS
I
"It is terrible to watch a man who has the Incomprehensible
in his grasp, does not know what to do with it, and sits
playing with a toy called God."
--_Letter to his brother Michael._
In his Criticism and Fiction, Mr. Howells wrote: "It used to be one of
the disadvantages of the practice of romance in America, which
Hawthorne more or less whimsically lamented, that there were few
shadows and inequalities in our broad level of prosperity; and it is
one of the reflections suggested by Dostoievsky's novel, The Crime and
the Punishment, that whoever struck a note so profoundly tragic in
American fiction would do a false and mistaken thing--as false and as
mistaken in its way as dealing in American fiction with certain
nudities which the Latin peoples seem to find edifying."
Who cares nowadays for the hard-and-fast classifications of idealist,
realist, romanticist, psychologist, symbolist, and the rest of the
phrases, which are only so much superfluous baggage for literary
camp-followers. All great romancers are realists, and the converse may
be true. You note it in Dumas and his gorgeous, clattering
tales--improbable, but told in terms of the real. For my part, I often
find them too real, with their lusty wenches and heroes smelling of
the slaughter-house. Turn now to Flaubert, master of all the moderns;
you may trace the romancer dear to the heart of Hugo, or the
psychologist in Madame Bovary, the archaeological novel in Salammbo, or
cold, grey realism as in L'Education Sentimentale, while his very
style, with its sumptuous verbal echoes, its resonant, rhythmic
periods--is not all this the beginning of that symbolism carried to
such lengths by Verlaine and his followers? Shakespeare himself ranged
from gross naturalism to the quiring of cherubim.
Walter Scott was a master realist if you forget his old-fashioned
operatic scenery and costumes. It is to Jane Austen we must go for the
realism admired of Mr. Howells, and justly. Her work is all of a
piece. The Russians are realists, but with a difference; and that
deviation forms the school. Taking Gogol as the norm of modern Russian
fiction--Leo Wiener's admirable anthology surprises with its specimens
of earlier men--we see the novel strained through the rich, mystic
imagination of Dostoievsky; viewed through the more equable,
artistic, and pessimistic temperament of Turgenieff, until it is
seized by Leo Tolstoy and passionately transformed to serve his own
didactic purposes. Realism? Yes, such as the world has never before
seen, and yet at times as idealistic as Shelley. It is not surprising
that Mr. John M. Robertson wrote, as far back as 1891: "In that
strange country where brute power seems to be throttling all the
highest life of the people ... there yet seems to be no cessation in
the production of truthful literary art ... for justice of perception,
soundness and purity of taste, and skill of workmanship, we in
England, with all our freedom, can offer no parallel."
Perhaps "freedom" is the reason.
And what would this critic have said of the De Profundis of Maxim
Gorky? Are there still darker depths to be explored? Little wonder Mr.
Robertson calls Kipling's "the art of a great talent with a cheap
culture and a flashy environment." Therefore, to talk of such
distinctions as realism and romance is sheer waste of time. It is but
a recrudescence of the old classic _vs._ romantic conflict. Stendhal
has written that a classicist is a dead romanticist. It still holds
good. But here in America, "the colourless shadow land of fiction," is
there no tragedy in Gilead for souls not supine? Some years ago Mr.
James Lane Allen, who cannot be accused of any hankerings after the
flesh-pots of Zola, made an energetic protest against what he
denominated the "feminine principle" in our fiction. He did not mean
the books written by women--in sooth, they are for the most part
boiling over with the joy of life--but he meant the feminism of so
much of our novel writing put forth by men.
The censor in Russia by his very stringency caused a great fictional
literature to blossom, despite his forbidding blue pencil. In America
the sentiment of the etiolated, the brainless, the prudish, the
hypocrite is the censor. (Though something might be said now about the
pendulum swinging too far in the opposite direction.) Not that Mr.
Howells is strait-laced, prudish, narrow in his views--but he puts his
foot down on the expression of the tragic, the unusual, the emotional.
With him, charming artist, it is a matter of temperament. He admires
with a latitude quite foreign to English-speaking critics such diverse
genius as Flaubert, Tolstoy, Turgenieff, Galdos, Jane Austen, Emilia
Pardo Bazan, Mathilde Serao--greater than any modern woman writer of
fiction--Henry James, and George Moore. But he admires each on his or
her native heath. That their particular methods might be given
universal application he does not admit. And when he wrote the above
about Dostoievsky New York was not so full of Russians and Poles and
people from southeastern Europe as it is now. Dostoievsky, if he were
alive, would find plenty of material, tragedy and comedy alike, on
our East Side.
The new translation of Dostoievsky in English by Constance Garnett is
significant. A few years ago Crime and Punishment was the only one of
his works well known. The Possessed, that extraordinary study of souls
obsessed by madness and crime, The Brothers Karamazov, The House of
the Dead, and The Idiot are to-day in the hands of American readers
who indorse what Nietzsche said of the Russian master: "This profound
man ... has perceived that Siberian convicts, with whom he lived for a
long time (capital criminals for whom there was no return to society),
were persons carved out of the best, the hardest and the most valuable
material to be found in the Russian dominions.... Dostoievsky, the
only psychologist from whom I had anything to learn." George Moore
once had dubbed the novelist, "Gaboriau with psychological sauce."
Since then, Mr. Moore has contributed a charming introduction to Poor
Folk, yet there is no denying the force and wit of his hasty epigram.
Dostoievsky is often melodramatic and violent; his "psychology" vague
and tortuous.
And in the letters exchanged between Nietzsche and Georg Brandes, the
latter writes of Dostoievsky after his visit to Russia: "He is a great
poet but a detestable fellow, altogether Christian in his emotions,
and quite _sadique_ at the same time. All his morality is what you
have christened 'Slave's' morality.... Look at Dostoievsky's face:
half the face of a Russian peasant, half the physiognomy of a
criminal, flat nose, little penetrating eyes, under lids trembling
with nervousness, the forehead large and well-shaped, the expressive
mouth telling of tortures without count, of unfathomable melancholy,
of morbid desires, endless compassion, passionate envy. An epileptic
genius whose very exterior speaks of the stream of mildness that fills
his heart, of the wave of almost insane perspicuity that gets into his
head, finally the ambition, the greatness of endeavour, and the envy
that small-mindedness begets.... His heroes are not only poor and
crave sympathy, but are half imbeciles, sensitive creatures, noble
drabs, often victims of hallucinations, talented epileptics,
enthusiastic seekers after martyrdom, the very types that we are
compelled to suppose probable among the apostles and disciples of the
early Christian era. Certainly no mind stands further removed from the
Renaissance."
Of all Dostoievsky's portraits after Sonia, the saintly prostitute,
that of Nastasia Philipovna in The Idiot is the most lifelike and
astounding. The career of this half-mad girl is sinister and tragic;
she is half-sister in her temperamental traits to Paulina in the same
master's admirable story The Gambler. Grushenka in The Brothers
Karamazov is another woman of the demoniac type to which Nastasia
belongs. Then there are high-spirited, hysterical girls such as
Katarina in Karamazov, Aglaia Epanchin in The Idiot, or Liza in The
Possessed (Besi). The border-land of puberty is a favourite theme with
the Russian writer. And consider the splendidly fierce old women,
mothers, aunts, grandmothers (Granny in The Gambler is a full-length
portrait worthy of Hogarth) and befuddled old men--retired from
service in state and army; Dostoievsky is a masterly painter of
drunkards, drabs, and neuropaths. Prince Mushkin (or Myshkin) the
semi-idiot in The Idiot is depicted with surpassing charm. He is half
cracked and an epileptic, but is one of the most lovable young men in
fiction. Thinking of him, you recall what Nietzsche wrote of Christ:
"One regrets that a Dostoievsky did not live in the neighbourhood of
this most interesting decadent, I mean some one who knew just how to
perceive the thrilling charm of such a mixture of the sublime, the
sickly, and the childish." Here is a "moral landscape of the dark
Russian soul," and an exemplification in the Prince Myshkin of The
Idiot, who is evidently an attempt to portray a latter-day Christ.
Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, like Rogozhin in The Idiot,
Stavrogin in The Possessed were supermen before Nietzsche, but all
half mad. A famous alienist has declared that three-fourths of
Dostoievsky's characters are quite mad. This is an exaggeration,
though there are many about whom the aura of madness and melancholy
hovers. Dostoievsky himself was epileptic; poverty and epilepsy were
his companions through a life crowded with unhappiness. (Born 1822,
died 1881.) He was four years in Siberia, condemned though innocent as
a member of the Petrachevsky group. He tells us that the experience
calmed his nerves. His recollections of his Dead House are harrowing,
and make the literature of prison life, whether written by Hugo, Zola,
Tolstoy, or others, like the literary exercise of an amateur. It is
this sense of reality, of life growing like grass over one's head,
that renders the novels of Dostoievsky "human documents." Calling
himself a "proletarian of letters" this tender-hearted man denied
being a psychologist--which pre-eminently he was: "They call me a
psychologist; it is not true. I am only a realist in the highest sense
of the word, _i. e._, I depict all the soul's depths."
If he has shown us the soul of the madman, drunkard, libertine, the
street-walker, he has also exposed the psychology of the gambler.
He knew. He was a desperate gambler and in Baden actually starved in
company with his devoted wife. These experiences may be found depicted
in The Gambler.
He has been called the "Bossuet of the detraques," but I prefer that
other and more appropriate title, the Dante of the North. His novels
are infernos. How well Nietzsche studied him; they were fellow spirits
in suffering. All Dostoievsky is in his phrase: "There are no ugly
women"--put in the mouth of the senile, debauched Karamazov, a
companion portrait to Balzac's Baron Hulot. His love for women has a
pathological cast. His young girls discuss unpleasant matters. Even
Frank Wedekind is anticipated in his Spring's Awakening by the Russian
in The Brothers Karamazov: "How can Katarina have a baby if she isn't
married?" cries one of the youngsters, a question which is the very
nub of the Wedekind play. "Two parallel lines may meet in eternity,"
which sounds like Ibsen's query: "Two and two may make five on the
planet Jupiter." He was deeply pious, nevertheless a questioner. His
books are full of theological wranglings. Consider the "prose-poem" of
the Grand Inquisitor and the second coming of Christ. Or such an idea
as the "craving for community of worship is the chief misery of man,
of all humanity from the beginning of time." We recognise Nietzsche in
Dostoievsky's "the old morality of the old slave man," and a genuine
poet in "the secret of the earth mingles with the mystery of the
stars." His naive conception of eternity as "a chamber something like
a bathhouse, long neglected, and with spider's webs in its corners"
reminds us of Nietzsche when he describes his doctrine of the Eternal
Recurrence. The Russian has told us in memorable phrases of the
blinding, intense happiness, a cerebral spasm, which lasts the
fraction of a second at the beginning of an epileptic attack. For it
he declares, for that brief moment during which paradise is disclosed,
he would sacrifice a lifetime. Little wonder in the interim of a cold,
grey, miserable existence he suffered from what he calls "mystic
fear," the fear of fear, such as Maeterlinck shows us in The Intruder.
As for the socialists he says their motto is: "Don't dare to believe
in God, don't dare to have property, fraternity or death, two millions
of heads!"
The foundational theme of his work is an overwhelming love for
mankind, a plea for solidarity which too often degenerates into sickly
sentimentalism. He imitated Dickens, George Sand, and Victor Hugo--the
Hugo of Les Miserables. He hated Turgenieff and caricatured him in The
Possessed. It is true that in dialogue he has had few superiors; his
men and women talk as they would talk in life and only in special
instances are mouthpieces for the author's ideas--in this quite
different from so many of Tolstoy's characters. Merejkowski has said
without fear of contradiction that Dostoievsky is like the great
dramatists of antiquity in his "art of gradual tension, accumulation,
increase, and alarming concentration of dramatic action." His books
are veritably tragic. In Russian music alone may be found a parallel
to his poignant pathos and gloomy imaginings and shuddering climaxes.
What is more wonderful than Chapter I of The Idiot with its
adumbration of the entire plot and characterisation of the book, or
Chapter XV and its dramatic surprises.
His cardinal doctrine of non-resistance is illustrated in the
following anecdote. One evening while walking in St. Petersburg,
evidently in meditation a beggar asked for alms. Dostoievsky did not
answer. Enraged by his apparent indifference, the man gave him such a
violent blow that he was knocked off his legs. On arising he picked up
his hat, dusted his clothes, and walked away; but a policeman who saw
the attack came running toward the beggar and took him to the lock-up.
Despite his protest Dostoievsky accompanied them. He refused to make a
charge, for he argued that he was not sure the prisoner was the
culpable one; it was dark and he had not seen his face. Besides, he
might have been sick in his mind; only a sick person would attack in
such a manner. Sick, cried the examining magistrate, that drunken
good-for-nothing sick! A little rest in jail would do him good. You
are wrong, contradicted the accused, I am not drunk but hungry. When a
man has eaten, he doesn't believe that another is starving. True,
answered Dostoievsky, this poor chap was crazy with hunger. I shan't
make a complaint. Nevertheless the ruffian was sentenced to a month's
imprisonment. Dostoievsky gave him three roubles before he left. Now
this kind man was, strange as it may seem, an anti-Semite. His diary
revealed the fact after his death. In life he kept this prejudice to
himself. I always think of Dostoievsky as a man in shabby clothes
mounting at twilight an obscure staircase in some St. Petersburg
hovel, the moon shining dimly through the dirty window-panes, and
cobwebs and gloom abounding. "I love to hear singing to a street
organ; I like it on cold, dark, damp autumn evenings, when all the
passers-by have pale, green, sickly faces, or when wet snow is falling
straight down; the night is windless ... and the street lamps shine
through it," said Raskolnikov. Here is the essential Dostoievsky.
And his tenacious love of life is exemplified in Raskolnikov's musing:
"Where is it I've read that some one condemned to death says or thinks
an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on
such a narrow ledge that he would only have room to stand, and the
ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest
around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all
his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live than to
die at once." We feel the repercussion of his anguish when death was
imminent for alleged participation in a nihilistic conspiracy. Or,
again, that horrid picture of a "boxed eternity": "We always imagine
eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast, vast! But
why must it be vast? Instead of all that, what if it's one little
room, like a bath-house in the country, black and grimy and spiders in
every corner, and that's all eternity is? I sometimes fancy it is
that." The grotesque and the sinister often nudge elbows in these
morbid, monstrous pages.
His belief in the unchanging nature of mankind is pure fatalism.
"Afterwards I understand ... that men won't change and that nobody can
alter it and that it's not worth wasting efforts over it.... Whoever
is strong in mind and spirit will have power over them. He who
despises most things will be a lawgiver among them, and he who dares
most of all will be most in right. Any one who is greatly daring is
right in their eyes. So it has been till now, and so it always will
be." Thus Rodion, the student to the devoted Sonia. It sounds like
Nietzsche avant la lettre. Or the cynicism of: "Every one thinks of
himself, and he lives most gaily who knows best how to deceive
himself." He speaks of his impending exile to Siberia: "But I wonder
shall I in those fifteen or twenty years grow so meek that I shall
humble myself before people and whimper at every word that I am a
criminal. Yes, that's it, that's it, that's what they are sending me
there for, that's what they want. Look at them running to and fro
about the streets, every one of them a scoundrel and a criminal at
heart, and worse still, an idiot. But try to get me off and they'd be
wild with righteous indignation. Oh, how I hate them all!" (The above
excerpts are from the admirable translation by Constance Garnett.)
As for his own mental condition, Dostoievsky gives us a picture of it
in Injury and Insult: "As soon as it grew dusk I gradually fell into
that state of mind which so often overmasters me at night since I've
been ill, and which I shall call mystic fear. It is a crushing anxiety
about something which I can neither define nor even conceive, which
does not actually exist, but which perhaps is about to be realised, at
this very moment, to appear and rise up before me like an inexorable,
horrible misshapen fact." This "frenzied anguish" is a familiar stigma
of epilepsy. Its presence denotes the approach of an attack.
But the "sacred malady" had, in the case of Dostoievsky, its
compensations. Through this fissure in the walls of his neurotic soul
he peered and saw its strange perturbations, divined their origins in
the very roots of his being, and recorded--as did Poe, Baudelaire, and
Nietzsche--the fluctuations of his sick will. With this Russian, his
Hamlet-like introspection becomes vertigo, and life itself fades into
a dream compounded of febrile melancholy or blood lust. It was not
without warrant that he allows Rogoszin, in The Idiot, to murder
Nastasia Philipovna, because of her physical charms. The aura of the
man foredoomed to morbid crime is unmistakable.
The letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoievsky came as a revelation
to his admirers. We think of him as overflowing with sentiment for
his fellow man, a socialist, one who "went to the people" long before
Tolstoy dreamed of the adventure, a man four years in prison in
Siberia, and six more in that bleak country under official inspection;
truly, a martyr to his country, an epileptic and a genius. You may be
disappointed to learn from these telltale documents--translated by
Ethel Colburn Mayne--that the Russian writer while in exile avoided
his fellow convicts, was very unpopular with them, and that throughout
his correspondence there are numerous contemptuous references to
socialism and "going to the people." He preferred solitude, he asserts
more than once, to the company of common folk or mediocre persons. He
gives Tolstoy at his true rating, but is cruel to Turgenieff--who
never wished him harm. The Dostoievsky caricature portrait of
Turgenieff--infinitely the superior artist of the two--in The
Possessed is absurd. Turgenieff forgave, but Dostoievsky never forgave
Turgenieff for this forgiveness. Another merit of these letters is the
light they shed on the true character of Tolstoy, who is shown in his
proper environment, neither a prophet nor a heaven-storming reformer.
Dostoievsky invented the phrase: "land-proprietor literature," to
describe the fiction of both Tolstoy and Turgenieff. He was abjectly
poor, gambled when he got the chance (which was seldom), hated Western
Europe, France and Germany in particular, but admired the novels of
George Sand, Victor Hugo, and Charles Dickens. He tells us much of
his painful methods of writing ("what do I want with fame when I'm
writing for daily bread?" he bitterly asks his brother), and the
overshadowing necessity that compelled him to turn in "copy" when he
lacked food, fire, friends. No wonder this private correspondence
shows us anything but a lover of mankind, no matter how suffused in
humanitarianism are his books, with their drabs, tramps, criminals,
and drunkards. Turgenieff divined in him Sadistic predispositions; he
was certainly a morbid man; while Tolstoy wrote of him: "It never
entered my head to compare myself with him.... I am weeping now over
the news of his death ... and I never saw the man." Dostoievsky was a
profound influence on the art and life of Tolstoy.
It may interest musical persons to learn that it was through the
efforts of Adolphe Henselt, piano virtuoso and composer, that
Dostoievsky was finally allowed to leave Siberia and publish his
writings. Henselt, who was at the time court pianist and teacher of
the Czarina, appealed to her, and thus the ball was set rolling that
ended in the clemency of the Czar. To Henselt, then, Russian
literature is indebted for the "greater Dostoievsky." Why he was ever
sent to Siberia is still a mystery. He had avowed his disbelief in the
teachings of the Petrachevsky group, and only frequented their
meetings because "advanced" European literature was read aloud.
Dostoievsky was never a nihilist, and in his open letter to some St.
Petersburg students he gives them sound advice as to the results of
revolution. Poor man! He knew from harsh experience.